Elsie McCarthy

Elsie Bramell (14 August 1909 – 14 May 1985) was an Australian anthropologist. She was the first person with a university degree and the first woman to be employed by the Australian Museum in its Anthropology Department. She and her husband, Fred McCarthy, were early advocates for the protection of Indigenous sites.

Early life and education Bramell was born on 14 August 1909 in Port Moresby, Territory of Papua. Her parents were Ada Blanch (née Skelly, later Bensted) who died in 1970 and Bertram William Bramell, a British public servant who became Commissioner of Native Affairs in New Guinea and later retired to Sydney where he died in 1938.

Bramell was sent to Mount St Mary's Dominican Convent in Moss Vale, for her primary education, before completing her secondary schooling at St George Girls' High School in Sydney, where she was school captain in 1927. She completed a BA in 1931 and a DipEd the following year.

When she began work at the Australian Museum in February 1933 she was the first person with a university degree and first woman to be employed in a scientific role within its Anthropology Department.

In 1946 the Australian Museum published The Stone Implements of Australia, written by her husband Frederick "Assisted by Elsie Bramell, MA, DipEd and H. V. V. Noone".

She joined the Anthropological Society of New South Wales in 1935 and served on the Editorial Committee for its journal, Mankind, from 1940 to 1946.

A laboratory, the Elsie Bramell Room, at the Northern Territory University in Darwin, was named in her honour.